The current issue of Time magazine contains a fascinating article about Albert Einstein’s belief in God and challenges my own rigid, non-conformist perception of the universe.
When asked if he believes in God, Einstein—the most brilliant mind of the 20th Century—replied: “I’m not an atheist. . . . the problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand those laws. . . .
“I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not the God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.. . .
“The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science . . . To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.” And so am I.
The last sentence of the Time article strikes a resonant chord: “For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God’s existence. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence. The fact that the world is incomprehensible, that it followed laws, was worthy of awe.” And so it is for me
This fire rainbow is said to be the rarest of all naturally occurring atmospheric phenomena. This photo was captured last June on the Idaho-Washington border and lasted about an hour.
The clouds must be cirrus at least 20,000 feet in the air with just the right amount of ice crystals, and the sun has to hit the clouds at an angle of precisely fifty-eight degrees.
Some see the fire rainbow as a miracle, but it is God’s handiwork, not a miracle. Albert Einstein would not view it as defying the laws of physics. Rather, he would see it as mysterious—the most beautiful emotion we can experience. “He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand in rapt awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.”
When I am asked about my religious beliefs, my stock reply is, “I am a secular humanist.” But I am no atheist. I agree with theologian Paul Tillich who postulates that radically finite beings, which we are, cannot be sustained or caused by another finite or existing being. What can sustain finite beings is being itself, or the “ground of being.” Thus Tillich identifies God. No deus ex machina. The Creator does not disobey his laws. All phenomena can be explained, even if we can only now see it dimly. Scientists still do not understand why the aurora borealis—the northern lights—occur. We are little children in Einstein’s huge library full of books we cannot read or understand. We are infants in our search to understand creation and the immutable but always-consistent laws of nature set in motion by the infinite “ground of being.”

My initiation to the ferocity of the ocean is on a PT boat night patrol in the Bering Sea hunting Japanese submarines in January 1944. Fortunately, we never encounter an enemy vessel. If we had, we would be unable to launch any kind of attack. We were too busy holding on for dear life as the seventy-eight-foot patrol torpedo boat with its three 1,500-horsepower Packard marine engines pounds the waves and takes green water over its bow, drenching everything and threatening to wash the crew and all the deck armament off the stern.

Question: What in hell am I doing out here? I’m the Supply Officer. I have to be in my office at 0800 while the boat officers and crews sack in; but Commander James B. Denny of Bellflower, Texas—-a regular Navy “mustang” and the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron’s commanding officer—-is a nut. If anyone has to go out on winter night patrols in one of the roughest bodies of water on Earth, everyone has to go.

With six layers of impervious foul weather gear and huge sea boots that make us waddle like penguins, we are soaked to the skin at the end of the patrol.

I survive because I have the best storekeeper in the U. S. Navy, John Butts, an Iowa farm boy. I manage to hang on to Butts through five months in the Aleutians and four months in transit to the South Pacific where we become part of Task Unit 70.1.4 consisting of twenty-six Higgins PT boats, see the first wave of Japanese suicide planes (kamikazes) strike with terrifying effect in the Philippines’ Leyte Gulf, the scene of the largest naval battle of World War II.

The task unit wins a Navy Unit Commendation for its “heroic” service at Mindoro Island from December 15, 1944 to February 5, 1945—under daily suicide plane attack and a nightly bombing. To illustrate the madness of war: The officer who wrote the official history of MTBRon 13 was one of two boat captains who abandoned their boats under fire at Mindoro and were never punished for this cowardly act.

The only time I got seasick on a PT boat was in the South Pacific when we are standing out from a dock at anchor on a smooth ocean with ten-foot swells. Up and down. Up and down. Retch. Retch.

As I am closing the outer bulkhead door, this heaving destroyer escort ploughs into a huge wave that crashes over its bow and floods the deck. The deluge sweeps me off my feet. Luckily, I maintain a tight grip on the hatchway. Luckily too, the safety net is rigged along the railing and catches a seaman like a large fish, keeping him from washing overboard. Five days out from my home base at Adak on a routine, 180-mile trip to Amchitka. The North Pacific is so rough in February 1944 we cannot make port and must return to Adak, my mission incomplete. As a guest passenger I am quartered in the sea cabin, the highest on the snap-rolling, lightweight ship. Sleep is almost impossible. I can stay in my bunk by wedging my body in sideways. I avoid seasickness by eating, so I spend most of the trip in the officers’ mess pigging out.

The sea and me, we just don’t agree.
The only time I know a ship on which I am a passenger is going to sink and carry several thousand men to Davy Jones’s Locker is on a huge Essex class aircraft carrier, part of the “magic carpet” fleet carrying us home at the end of the Pacific war from Samar in the Philippines to San Francisco. Have you ever looked at a forty-five-foot wave towering over you? It’s a sight to terrify the bravest man and make him poop in his pants.

This carrier’s hangar deck has been converted into a passenger ship with enlisted men in bunks stacked five high. The ship’s captain can’t fit the carrier’s long hull into the wave troughs. The hangar deck doors are caved in by huge waves, and three thousand enlisted men lose all their possessions as sea bags are swept overboard while the men hang on to their bunks, solidly welded to the deck. Some forty-five ships sink in that December 1945 North Pacific storm. Somehow we limped in under the Golden Gate. What a magnificent sight.

When I return to Chicago by special train from Oakland to meet my two-year-old son and take my beloved wife into my aching arms, I swear I will never get on board another ocean-going vessel. A canoe, yes. A white water raft on the Arkansas River, ok, but no ship sailing the high seas. Reading the Perfect Storm solidified my resolve. I can’t eat swordfish, thinking of all those intrepid fishermen drowning to catch them in the North Atlantic.

But damned if my wife doesn’t talk me into a promised smooth, luxury cruise on the Caribbean Sea and through the Panama Canal. The “Song of America” with its 1,500 fun-loving passengers sets sail from Miami. Those of us who can’t repress memories of that ill-fated voyage call it the “cruise to Hell.”

Murphy’s Law is in full sway from the get go. I learn my lesson and hope she does too. This magnificent vessel is probably still filled with the virulent respiratory germs our group brought on board and generously shared with all the other passengers. That’s the tip of the iceberg of our troubled outing. Half the passengers are cabin bound as we inched our way through the Panama Canal. The highlight of the cruise is the lowlight.

I love to stand holding her hand on Main Beach in Laguna and watch an electric, violet sunset over the Pacific, but she will never, ever get me on board an ocean cruise ship again, so help me God!

Among my father’s seven siblings, the oldest and most exciting was George Winslow Blodgett, a superb sculptor and flamboyant figure in Santa Fe society from the early 1930s until his death at 70 in 1958.
This Bachrach portrait projects the sparkling panache that was his artistic and social signature.
Santa Fe remembers Win for his piercing brown eyes, tanned bald head, his suave manner, gallantry and many lady friends for his work uniform of white sweatshirt, white flannel slacks and low white tennis shoes and for his gleaming, custom-built, white Lincoln roadster he drove for nearly thirty years.
At 19, he left the comforts of Northfield, Minnesota where his father owned a successful lumber business so successful that Charles Webster Blodgett retired at age 40 a millionaire. Win headed for the Pacific Northwest where he worked as a lumberjack and homesteader. According to a Time magazine story, he was so skilled at carving wood with an axe that his fellow lumberjacks pooled their financial resources and sent him to Paris to study art. We suspect Winslow inspired and probably wrote this fanciful tale. During his two and one-half years in Paris he had a vision of a great museum to preserve Native American art a vision he worked feverishly to bring about and would have succeeded, if World War II hadn’t derailed the project. With his personal charm he recruited Louis Bromfield, Henry Ford, Eleanor Roosevelt and William Allen White to be museum sponsors.
When Winslow died in 1958 without a will, his younger brother Ted went to Santa Fe and crated all the bronze and plaster heads and shipped them to his sister Kate’s home in Ross, California, where they remained in storage until after both Ted and Kate died. Kate’s son, Robin Williams, and sculptor James Cummings II rescued the eight crates containing forty-one plaster heads and hauled them to Cummings’ studio in Petaluma, California.
Working with painstaking care, Cummings pried open the nailed lids, gently removed the brown excelsior fibers and gingerly lifted a plaster head from its twenty-five-year-old cocoon.
By chance, the first head was the likeness of Marcial Quintana, Cochita Pueblo from Keres, New Mexico. Cummings slowly turned the sculpture full circle in his cradling hands, then stared transfixed into Quitana’s proud, strong, dignified face. Cummings had seen a black-and-white photo of the original bronze housed at the Museum of New Mexico, but he was not prepared for the powerful impact of the plaster head on his highly developed aesthetic senses.
“From that moment I was hooked on the artistry of George Winslow Blodgett,” Cummings said. “I made a promise to myself: James, you are going to cast these fragile plasters into bronze. This work must be preserved.” And James Cummings kept that promise.
Out of the weathered crates he removed Winslow’s most famous piece, the well-rounded, Buddha-like head of Albert Lujan, Tewa from Taos, purchased by the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1933.
In announcing the acquisition of Win’s most famous piece, the Metropolitan Museum wrote: “Winslow is intensely concerned with the preservation for posterity of the various facial types still to be found among this rapidly-disappearing people, an objective which provides an incentive for concentrated, serious work such as few sculptors have been fortunate to have. Time itself is an important factor in the transmutation into permanent materials of these extraordinary faces. This, combined with his great and almost religious admiration of the Indians themselves, has spurred the artist to tireless effort.”
Writing in the December 1935 issue of New Mexico magazine, famed art critic Ina Sizer Cassidy commented on Winslow’s technique: “Winslow’s work is simplified to the last degree, his planes being only those needed to delineate the significant form and inner spirit of his model, giving strength and dignity to his portraits. It is amazing to observe the individual expressions he gets in the eyes of his sitters, as clearly individualized as is gotten by painters and accomplished by lines and planes alone.”
Lujan was a familiar figure in Santa Fe where he sat outside La Fonda Hotel every day with one of his grandchildren, holding a basket in his ample lap for tourist contributions.
Winslow’s many nieces and nephews owe an enormous debt of gratitude to James Cummings II for saving our favorite uncle’s truly magnificent bronze heads. I had the honor of working closely with Cummings in telling the story of Winslow’s career and in attempting to market the bronzes through a Santa Fe art gallery. Unsuccessfully. Cummings selected nine of the plaster heads to cast into bronze and for several years had them for sale in his own Laguna Beach gallery where I discovered them¾to my surprise and delight. The Laguna Beach Gallery closed several years ago. I have photos of the nine bronze heads mounted on handsome red koa wood on display in Laguna Beach. I sent the photo and a brief story about Cummings and Winslow to my hometown newspaper in Northfield. The editor, Maggie Lee, wrote an excellent story and put it on page one. Maggie was valedictorian of my high school graduating class of 1939. I was salutatorian, but we have maintained a close friendship for seventy-eight years.
Noted psychologist David Seabury published an article in Creative Art magazine in 1933 in which he praised Winslow’s unique talents: “It is so rare to find a man who senses meaning and yet does not try to evade reality, who seeks meaning in the form behind the form and lets that meaning so empower his vision and strengthen his touch that he renders the life before him with true power and perception.
“After studying abroad for two years, Blodgett conceived the idea in 1928 of creating a sculptural group that would fairly represent the Indians of the Southwest and stand as a memorial to these people ‘from whom we have taken so much and given so little.’” I believe my glamorous, dashing and highly talented uncle Win achieved his goal. Thanks to James Cummings II, we can bear witness to our uncle’s remarkable accomplishment.